Mech Apiaries in Maple Valley has experienced a severe dropoff in honey production. Colony collapse disorder has been blamed for bee deaths worldwide.

Mech Apiaries in Maple Valley has experienced a severe dropoff in honey production. Colony collapse disorder has been blamed for bee deaths worldwide.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Mech Apiaries co-owner Don Mech fills jars with honey from his bees.

Mech Apiaries co-owner Don Mech fills jars with honey from his bees.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Honeybees enter and leave a hive at Mech Apiaries in Maple Valley. Some Northwest beehives are barely surviving this year.

Honeybees enter and leave a hive at Mech Apiaries in Maple Valley. Some Northwest beehives are barely surviving this year.

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Despite the bee crisis, you still can savor Northwest honeys

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MAPLE VALLEY -- There are still areas where the bees busily cluster and circle at Mech Apiaries, ready to feast on pollen from the knotweed growing beside a nearby creek, crawling busily over the fragrant anise hyssop and bright dahlias in Doris Mech's garden.

Normally, Doris and Don Mech, who have sold their honey at Pike Place Market since 1974, would be harvesting a flow of fall honey from their well-loved hives. Not this year. While some of the 20 bee boxes on their land bustle with healthy activity, others are dwindling or dead, and there is no honey in production. While walking down the grassy aisle between her boxes, Mech noted a sick bee, crawling across the ground rather than flying free.

"It's not looking good in the apiary," she said.

"The queens are failing. Normally a queen bee will live three to five years, but the queens are not even living a year. It's baffling."

Honey keeps well, and the Meches, drifting toward retirement, still sell goods that include honey from current summertime flows, as well as their famous fireweed honey from Mount Rainier and prized maple blossom honey from years of drier springs and stronger bees. Mech, serving up honey-kissed cookies on a recent morning, still tests and updates recipes for new editions of her "Joy with Honey" cookbook.

But they -- like beekeepers throughout Washington, the U.S. and even the world -- are hard hit by a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, blamed for wiping out a quarter of the U.S. honeybee population in 2007.

The disorder is the subject of a striking new book, "Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis" (Bloomsbury USA, $25) by food and environmental writer Rowan Jacobsen. The University Book Store will host a reading by Jacobsen -- and a honey tasting -- at 7 p.m. Thursday.

The title echoes Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," and the implications are similarly harrowing. Jacobsen reminds readers that bees provide not just the sweetness of honey, but also are a crucial link in the life cycle of our crops.

"It's a system we've taken for granted," Jacobsen wrote.

"Because nature always looked after it, we have been as clueless and complacent about the realities of plant reproduction as a child who thinks that storks bring new babies. We assumed it just happened, and would go on happening. If the crops bloomed, fruit would follow. We can no longer count on that, and there are no options other than bees."

It's a lesson Northwest beekeepers already know.

"One out of every three bites of food you put in your mouth comes from something that's been pollinated," said Sue Olson of Yakima-based Olson Apiaries, one of the largest in the state. The business lost 4,000 of its 13,000 bee colonies last year, an estimated loss of $1.2 million.

The Olsons, like most major modern beekeepers, transport their bees to California for the massive and lucrative task of pollinating the almond fields. Then they head back to the Northwest to pollinate tree fruits.

"Being in Washington, we also do cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, and then we do a lot of seed pollination in the basin. Onions -- you don't think about onions being pollinated," Olson said. "Carrots. Kohlrabi. ... Alfalfa, to grow for hay for the cattle." Eight of Washington's 10 most valuable crops are bee-dependent, according to Washington State University.

"You're kind of on a treadmill. What is it next?" Olson said. "You keep going and going and going, but you don't know what the answers are to what happened in the past. It's frightening."

The Olsons recently helped provide seed money for a research project at WSU to establish a baseline of health for Washington bees. They hope it will alleviate the problems of an industry that, a leading beekeeper told Jacobsen, has become "like crystal. It's that fragile."

In the book, Jacobsen takes readers on a roller-coaster journey through the crisis, reviewing the science of beekeeping and the habits of bees, the story of modern pollination and the science of the disease, in an engaging mix of mystery and storytelling.

The colloquial take on a scientific topic came because "I don't want to make it like medicine that people feel is good for them that they resist," he said in a phone interview from his home in Vermont. "Also, the more I learned about bees, the more I was charmed by them. I really wanted to help the reader be charmed by them, too."

He reviews the discounted theories of the disease and the ones in play, the stresses and diseases afflicting modern bees, and the striking lack of in-depth research on how pesticides interact and affect bees over their lifetimes. In the end, there are theories, but no smoking gun.

"In mystery stories you get to the end and find out who done it, but in life it's not always like that," Jacobsen said. "You've got all these different things going on, and you're never going to be able to separate all the threads. ...

"You can just draw general conclusions, and the only response is to get back to some basic practices that have been shown to be effective for thousands of years."

For Doris Mech, a former home economics teacher who always found honey to be a "wholesome, delicious food," beekeeping has sustained her and her husband through decades. Don, a former Boeing engineer, became interested in the field after reading an article decades ago on a beekeeper who had reached his 80s but loved the work too much to retire.

Now Mech is 76 himself, still sitting on the same low milking stool to transfer warmed honey from a stainless steel tank to hexagonal glass jars, which mimic the shape of honeycomb cells.

The Meches no longer truck their bees to the mountains to take in the Rainier fireweed, which reduced the size of their operation. The hives, 200 at their peak, have dwindled to around 20. But Doris Mech said they can't imagine giving up the ones that remain. They'll order more bees to replace the ones that have died out, and hope for new honey flows -- dark, fruity honey from wild blackberry vines or light, mild and fragrant from the brilliant fireweed flowers. Just having the bees to work with, she said, is a bright spot of waking up.

If there's any silver lining to the bee crisis, it's the number of people who have discovered the pleasures of beekeeping, starting up their own backyard hives. It takes a serious commitment of time and mental energy, Jacobsen wrote, but is "an ideal, life-affirming hobby" that could help make a dent in the pollination problems.

Jacobsen has taken on the beekeeper hat himself and orders bees from a farmer he profiles in the book, one who raises a hardy strain of Russian bees.

One of the factors that first drew him to honey, he said, was its terroir -- the relationship of each jar to the land where it was made. Think of Eastern buckwheat honey or California orange blossom. Eventually, Jacobsen likes to think of his own bees pollinating the vegetables on his neighbor's organic farm, maybe making a little Vermont honey of their own.

But his only real goal for the first year, he said, is to keep them alive.

Mix all dry ingredients together in a large bowl, reserving ½ cup of the coconut for the baking pans. Beat the oil, honey and egg together in another small bowl. Chop the raisins and chocolate chips on a cutting board. Stir the honey mixture and the chopped mixture into the bowl of dry ingredients.

On an ungreased baking pan, sprinkle 2 teaspoons of coconut in every spot where a cookie will bake, evenly spacing them to allow for 10 cookies on the pan. Now place about ¼ cup of cookie dough on top of each coconut sprinkling. Bake in 350-degree oven about 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on wire rack.

HONEY BUTTER WHIP

MAKES 1 1/2 CUPS

½ cup butter (1 stick)

½ cup honey

½ cup whipping cream

Let the butter stand at room temperature until softened. Gradually combine the honey, beating together until well blended. Add whipping cream and beat with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Serve with pancakes, waffles or fresh berries.